[pacman-dev] implement .so dependencies?

[Nagy Gabor]

> 1) I'd prefer just using a single depends array rather than an 
> additional sodepends array.  A version of pacman's "-d" ignoring 
> dependency versioning would not require a separate array and would be 
> far more useful than one that ignored sodepends.  I think that should be 
> implemented in pacman no matter what.

I don't really like introducing sodepends/soprovides array neither, but
I am not 100% against it neither. I like versioned soprovides/sodepends,
but it looks very hackish. :-)

> 2) I do not like "magically" adding libraries to the depends/provides 
> array.  I really want them to be manually specified (versions can be 
> automatic - see #3).  For example, the readline package would want to 
> provide libreadline.so as that is important but libhistory.so is really 
> not...  What is important or not would be up to the distro packagers.

In order to get this work without pain, the patch requires a slight
modification. If you want to limit soprovides to important .so files,
then the requiredby packages' (so)depends array should be also filled in
manually or with care. It would be packager-friendly to leave this work
to makepkg, and then it should check the (so)provides array
of .so-provider dependency.

This modification is also needed in order to make my earlier statement
true (sorry for my mistake):
"Moreover, due to this feature, distros can introduce
sodepends/soprovides step-by-step (without rebuilding all packages in
the repo), or they can limit this feature to some "critical" packages."

Bye